How do I make a Numbers page active?

[evennewerbie]

This Numbers spreadsheet is supposed to increase my productivity. So far it is doing the opposite. For almost every little action I have to look up the instructions in Help, OK gotta learn (hoping there are no upgrades any time soon making it not work again!) but too often what Help says seems not to be true. Or true only some of the time.

E.g. I open Numbers spreadsheet page that I worked on yesterday. Help says you make the Page active by double clicking on it. I do that. It remains inert. This has happened before and I got it to work eventually, I don't know how. Likewise there are things on the page like a white dot in the circle or an inverted L that you must use to do various things. But these things are sometimes to be seen and sometimes not.

What am I likely going wrong for opening and activating the page?

 

[Lufbrarunner]

I have used Excel for many years and I am quite proficient with spreadsheets, I find numbers to be a little limiting and not very intuitive. Things that I do in seconds in Excel take minutes in numbers.
I guess that as it is free, numbers is not going to have all the bells and whistles but for the same price (ie FREE) you could use Open Office or Libre Office both of which seem to have more features and are easier to use.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Sorry you are having so much trouble with Numbers, having come from Excel. I agree that it is quite a bit different, and it takes a bit to get used to. But, once you know the basics, I actually prefer it to Excel.

The best way to complete the transition, and learn the basics, is to take a little time and read though Apple's online Numbers Help. It will go through all of the controls and their locations, as well as other functions you are familiar with.

Hope that helps,

C

 

[honestone]

I recently switched from Office 2016 to the latest version of LibreOffice (it's free!), and I am very pleased with both its Writer Document app (equivalent to Word 2016) and its Calc Spreadsheet app (equivalent to Excel 2016). You can get LibreOffice from here:

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/ (It looks like V6.2 is still in development, but V6.1.5.2 is the most stable one)